By Ron Rosenbaum

It was the "$177 Bagel" that did it, finally solved for me the mystery of how the New York Post remains the nation's iconic daily tabloid in a media realm overrun by celebrification.

Despite not being a celeb or a serial killer, the $177 bagel was the subject of a Post cover on Feb. 10, the day a blizzard hit New York City. Instead of going with some conventional "Snowpocalypse" headline, the Post front page was dominated by terrorism-size type about the bagel, complete with a color photo of … a bagel. True, not the bagel, the long-digested original, but a stunt bagel, you might say, a stuffed half-bagel sandwich that was meant to represent the offending breakfast item. Or, to be precise, the breakfast item of the offender.

I've long been a humble student of the tabloid art. I once did a story on the legendary New York Daily News homicide guy, the late Pat Doyle (nickname: "The Inspector" because he supposedly let his crime-scene sources assume he was a cop). Doyle boasted he'd covered 15,000 homicides. In another piece for Harpers in 1983 (subscription required, I'm afraid), I compared the Post's focus on crimes of passion to our founding fathers' concerns about the dangers "the passions" posed to democratic rule, as discussed in The Federalist Papers. (I probably don't need to add that the founder of the Post was founding father Alexander Hamilton. Coincidence? I guess.)

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